​a friend of a friend narrated this once, a couple of lifetimes ago.

in East Berlin, there’s this big public square in front of the cathedral called the Bebelplatz.

on Sundays, he would often walk to the Bebelplatz.

it wasn’t the grand architecture which took him there, it was the evil of the place.

one night in May 1933, the Nazis led a torch-lit mob into the square and looted the library of the adjoining Friedrich-Wilhelm University.

forty thousand people cheered as they burnt over twenty thousand books by Jewish authors.

many years later, a panel of glass was set into the ground to mark the spot where the fire had been.

its a window and, by leaning over, you can look into a room below.

the room is white, lined from floor to ceiling with plain shelves.

an empty library.

the sort of world we’d live in if the fanatics had won.

its a good memorial, better than any statue.

after a couple of visits to the plaza, the narrator realized that the empty library wasn’t the only interesting thing.

an old city cleaner with watery eyes, a guy whi was there every Sunday sweeping up, was a fake.

to the narrator, the sweeper’s “legend” wasn’t quite right.

he was too thorough in his work and the grey overalls were tailored a bit too well.

so one day, he asked him why he swept the square.

he said he was seventy years old, it was hard to find a job, and a man had to earn an honest living – and then he saw the look on the narrator’s face and didn’t bother lying anymore.

he sat down, rolled up his sleeve and showed the narrator seven faded numbers tattooed on his wrist.

he was Jewish, and he pointed at groups of old men of his generation, dressed in their Sunday suits, taking the sun on nearby seats.

he told the narrator that they were Germans – but like a lot of Germans, they hadn’t changed, they’d just lost.

in their hearts, he said, they still sang the old songs.

he said that he swept the square so that they would see him and know: a Jew had survived, the race lived on, their people had ENDURED.

the square was his revenge.

as a child, the square had been his playground and he said that he was there the night the Nazis came.

he pointed at the old university and said his father was the librarian and the family had lived in an apartment behind his father’s office.

a few years after the bonfire, the mob came for him and his family.

like he said, it’s always the same – they start out burning books and end up burning people.

out of his parents and five kids, he was the only survivor.

he passed through three camps in five years, all of them death camps, including Auschwitz.

because it was such a miracle that he had survived, the narrator asked him what he had learned.

the old man laughed and said nothing you’d call original.

death’s terrible, suffering’s worse; as usual, the shits made up the marjority – on both sides of the wire.

he then thought for a moment and said there was one thing the experience had taught him.

he said that he’d learned that when millions of people, a whole political system, countless numbers of citizens who believe in God, said they were going to kill you – JUST LISTEN TO THEM.